Ahead of the most significant game of the season so far, the Huskies lost two defenders to retirement because of medical problems. Junior CB Austin Joyner has had multiple concussions, and junior DE Jared Pulu has a chronic kidney condition.

“Those are hard things, but they are in great care right now,” coach Chris Petersen told reporters after practice. “They will stay with us and always be part of us."

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The notion of QB Jake Browning as a runner tends to scare Huskies football fans because his four-year tenure has produced some vivid moments not unlike a giraffe falling down stairs. But without his critical rushes Saturday night, the Washington victory drought against UCLA in Pasadena would have added a 24th year.

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In the final seconds of the first half, after the Huskies missed a short field goal to keep their lead at 14-0, BYU was in desperate search for a way to avoid irrelevance. Instead, they ran into Mr. Irrepressible.

Actually, LB Ben Burr-Kervin caught them from behind. The national defensive player of the week roared up along the sideline behind RB Lopini Katoa as he crossed the BYU 20.

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Against Arizona State, a team that has beaten Washington 11 of the previous 12 meetings -- including a 13-7 loss a year ago in Tempe that was the Huskies' most inexplicable game of the 2017 season --  nothing can taken for granted, and every good thing must be cherished.

So despite a stylistically modest outcome, which began with an immodest dumpster-fire play, the 27-20 triumph Saturday night (box) at Husky Stadium was vital.

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For a game that 10th-ranked Washington seemed to control -- no easy feat with Salt Lake City's altitude and attitude in a sellout crowd at Rice-Eccles Stadium -- peril seemed perpetually imminent. Particularly after one of the most egregious turnovers in the four-year career of Jake Browning.

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For a 45-3 win (box) that included 632 yards, you can argue it's a stretch to say that the University of Washington's offense was often crappy. But that's because you were not present in person, nor in front of a screen, to see how the Huskies handled themselves Saturday against North Dakota, a program that is to big-time college football what Justin Bieber is to low-post play in basketball.

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By the time of the December reckoning for the 2018 college football season, the details of how Auburn beat Washington 21-16 (box) on Sept. 1 likely will be forgotten by the NCAA playoff committee members and bowl selectors. They won't be forgotten by Huskies coach Chris Petersen.

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In terms of scandal-o-rama, the NCAA is running a distant second to the Trump administration. But since part of the NCAA's mission includes seeing to the welfare of students, they shouldn't even be in the "also receiving votes" listing in a top-25 poll of American institutions.

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A few months after his national nonfiction best-seller, The Boys in the Boat, was published in 2014, Seattle author Daniel James Brown was showing a friend around the Conibear Shell House on the University of Washington campus. They looked at the trophies accrued over decades by successful Huskies teams, and gazed upon the legendary Husky Clipper, the shell used to win gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics under the grim glare of Hitler.

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What Nate Robinson said Monday about being offered $100,000 by a booster to keep playing football instead of basketball for the University of Washington was less of a revelation and more of a tradition. And we all know how big tradition is for college football.

Huskies boosters were doing this long before Robinson's father, UW running back Jacque Robinson, was born. Ask Hugh (The King) McElhenny.

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The Pac-12 Conference Monday selected 11 athletes, including University of Washington QB Sonny Sixkiller for induction into the league's Hall of Honor. Sixkiller and his fellow inductees will be enshrined March 9 during a ceremony prior to the semifinals of men's conference basketball tournament in Las Vegas.

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University of Washington football coach Chris Petersen put the finishing touches on his 2018 recruiting class Tuesday, one day after Jacob Eason, a former five-star quarterback out of Lake Stevens High, officially transferred to Montlake from the University of Georgia. Petersen has not only signed perhaps the Pac-12's best class, but obtained in Eason the overwhelming favorite to succeed Jake Browning.

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In a move fairly unusual for players with NFL-caliber talent, RB Myles Gaskin said he is planning to come back for his senior season with his University of Washington teammates. Ahead of Monday's deadline for declaring intent for the NFL, Gaskin told the Seattle Times Sunday he had unfinished business.

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Keith Jackson was that rare sort of personality so endearingly engaging that everywhere he worked, people liked the idea of having a small claim on him. Broadcasting a college football game on national TV, fans of the host school believed that when he did "our" game, he was "our" guy.

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QB Jacob Eason, the 2015 national prep player of the year from Lake Stevens High School who lost to injury his starting job at Georgia, is heading back home to play at the University of Washington.

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The University of Washington finished 16^th in the final Associated Press college football poll, which was taken after Alabama defeated Georgia for the national championship Monday night in Atlanta. The Huskies, No. 12 in the final regular-season AP rankings, fell four spots after losing to Penn State 35-28 in the Fiesta Bowl Dec. 30.

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The college football season ended Monday night in Atlanta with Alabama's 26-23 victory over Georgia for the national title. Fun game. But for denizens of the Pac-12 Conference, they wished the season had ended right after the regular season.

That way, the critics could only speculate on the dubious competitive worth of Pac-12 football in 2017, instead of having it confirmed across the fruited plain by a 1-8 bowl record.

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Down 28-7, it was plain that Washington was not on the same level as Penn State. But after the Huskies rallied to have a shot to win the Fiesta Bowl Saturday afternoon, it was also plain that the Huskies were on a level commensurate with the heyday of Don James.

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Takeaway

No. 9 Penn State rolled to a 28-7 lead, weathered a significant Washington rally, and pounded home a 35-28 victory over the 11th-ranked Huskies at the Fiesta Bowl Saturday in Glendale, AZ (box). UW's loss capped the worst showing ever by the Pac-12 in a single bowl season. The conference finished 1-8.

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The player who stepped in for the Huskies' best returning defender in 2017 now gets to be in charge of stopping the perhaps the college nation's best all-purpose back. If MLB Ben Burr-Kervin pulls it off Saturday afternoon in Glendale, the good-as-new repair will stand as a significant achievement for Chris Petersen's regime at Washington.

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